GoldandBlack.com Purdue Football History 101--The Early Years (1887-1936)
GoldandBlack.com’s Tom Dienhart and Alan Karpick, along with Purdue Football Vault author Tom Schott, talk about the triumphs and tragedies of the first 50 years of Purdue football.
Excerpt from Tom Schott’s Purdue Football Vault: The History of the Boilermakers
Purdue Train Wreck: Oct. 31, 1903
From Nov. 17, 1900, to Oct. 3, 1903, the Boilermakers won 15 games and all were whitewashes. Under coach Oliver Cutts, Purdue was sitting 4-2 (0-2 in the Western Conference with losses at Chicago and to Illinois) the morning of Halloween in 1903 when tragedy struck.
Purdue was scheduled to play Indiana at Washington Park in Indianapolis in a highly anticipated game of the budding rivalry. Two special trains had been chartered from the Big Four Railroad to transport the Boilermakers, band, students, faculty and fans from Lafayette.
About 9:55 a.m., the first train, consisting of 14 cars, crashed into a 10-car section of coal cars being backed down the track near 18th Street, about three miles away from Union Station. A clerk up the line had failed to inform a yardmaster of the approaching train.
The first car of the train — the place of honor — carrying the players, coaches and staff was completely demolished, one end thrown about 50 feet to the right of the track and the remainder torn to bits and either jammed against the end of the coal car train or flung to either side of the track.
Sixteen Boilermakers died: assistant coach Edward Robertson, who had set the still-existing field goals record three years earlier; athletic trainer Patrick McClaire; and players Thomas Bailey, Joseph Coates, Gabriel Drollinger, Charles Furr, Charles Grube, Jay Hamilton, Walter Hamilton, Roswell Powell, Wilbert Price, Walter Roush, George Shaw, Samuel Squibb, Samuel Truitt and Harry Wright. Lafayette businessman Newton Howard, who was with the team as a special honor for his fan interest and favors extended, also was killed. Some 30 additional passengers were injured or maimed for life.
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The tragedy was summed up succinctly in the Nov. 11 Purdue Exponent: “Within a second the flower of the University student body had been almost annihilated … A more pathetic incident cannot be imagined or one of more lasting impression.”
Among those injured were Cutts and player-manager Harry Leslie, who later served as governor of Indiana from 1929 to 1933. Band members, riding in the second car, miraculously escaped serious harm when the car left the track and plunged down an embankment.
The balance of the 1903 season was canceled. With the help of the Big Four Railroad, money was raised and in 1909 Memorial Gymnasium was dedicated on the Purdue campus to those killed in the wreck. The Computer Science Building now occupies that site.
Proving its fortitude, Purdue football returned with a vengeance in 1904, sporting a 9-3 record (1-2 Western Conference) under Cutts, who also served as athletics director in 1904 and 1905 and from 1915 to 1918. Keeping up their recent trend, the Boilermakers won seven games in shutout fashion, including 27-0 over Indiana on Nov. 12 and 36-0 over Notre Dame on Nov. 24.
